Thursday, March 3, 2011

Windows

Many a beautiful stained-glass church window has somehow spoken to my heart and lifted my mind from considering ordinary thoughts to being aware of God's presence. I never stopped to analyze why this is so, until I was discussing with a friend some lovely old church windows that, regretfully, had to be left behind when our congregation moved to a new site. I was not present then, but I empathized with the sense of loss this must have created. He pointed out that there was nothing sacred about those old Victorian floral windows. Happily, the new site was outfitted with lovely, newly created stained-glass windows that tell the stories of the Bible.

I remember driving along one night and thinking, praying, "Why do those windows touch us so?" And then this thought came to me...

Church Windows

What is it about church windows
That speaks to us of God?
There is nothing sacred in them,
Just glass and lead,
Dark and cold,
'Til God-made sunbeams
Flow through
Dazzling witnesses below
With purpose and meaning,
With radiant color,
And streams of light.

Why do human spirits sense the Presence
In a light-flooded, jewel-toned spectacle
Arranged in Gothic portrayals of saints
Or Victorian florals
Or modern undulating, geometric shapes?

Unspoken intuition or soft-spoken Spirit
Bathes us in hope-filled affinity...
In our kinship to the glass.
We, too, are cold and dark,
We, too, need God's Christ-Light
Flowing in and through
Before we come to Life,
We, too.

Sometimes one poem leads to another... this time about the windows of the very first church I attended as a small child.

About Me

I am a forty-something wife and mother living in the American Midwest. My interests include reading, writing, drawing, dancing, history, entertaining, and home-keeping. I'm learning to sew a little, too.
With so much to interest, I have difficulty settling long into anything, but my attention span does allow me enough time to write poems.
Way back when I was in college, I read The Temple by George Herbert and was greatly influenced by his poems and also by a few lines by Izaak Walton from his Life of Mr. George Herbert, which read, "Why are not sonnets made of Thee, and lays/ Upon Thine altar burnt?"
While not all the poems I write are about God (some of them are), they all come from this wonderful life He has given me and feel to me like gifts from Him. Of course, I cannot hope to rival or even approach the beauty of Mr. Herbert's work. Nevertheless, I offer what I do have, a few more lays, however homely, for His altar.